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US Air Force Wants To Plasma Bomb The Sky To Improve Radio Communication (newscientist.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: [The U.S. Air Force has plans to improve radio communication over long distances by detonating plasma bombs in the upper atmosphere using a fleet of micro satellites. It's not the first time we've tried to improve radio communication by tinkering with the ionosphere. HAARP, the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program in Alaska, stimulates the ionosphere with radiation from ground-based antennas to produce radio-reflecting plasma.] Now the USAF wants to do this more efficiently, with tiny satellites -- such as CubeSats -- carrying large volumes of ionized gas directly into the ionosphere. As well as increasing the range of radio signals, the USAF says it wants to smooth out the effects of solar winds, which can knock out GPS, and also investigate the possibility of blocking communication from enemy satellites. [There are at least two major challenges. One is building a plasma generator small enough to fit on a CubeSat -- roughly 10 centimeters cubed. Then there's the problem of controlling exactly how the plasma will disperse once it is released. The USAF has awarded three contracts to teams who are sketching out ways to tackle the approach. The best proposal will be selected for a second phase in which plasma generators will be tested in vacuum chambers and exploratory space flights.]
Should be fine too, right?
please use your missile satellites to knock off those flying US turds. Enough of the world has been bombed by USA as it is.
What is the real reason here? It is not as if we have a problem with communication these days. I post this in Europe, people all over the world can read it after a fraction of a second. Bandwith and latency are solved problems too - go download something or play online games.
Cables and satellites work fine. Why make short-lived modifications to the ionosphere, that need to be constantly replenished? If they can afford a set of satellites, why not simply use those as communication relays? The lag is not so bad when they are in low orbits.
Bearing in mind that public funds are involved here, I'm struggling to understand why improving radio communications using "plasma bomb" satellites is such a great idea when satellites already do such a great job improving radio communications. In other words, we have vast numbers of artificial ionosphere "bouncers" already orbiting our planet, and we can also have high altitude tethered balloons and long duration airborne aircraft (perhaps solar electric) that the likes of Google and Facebook are working on -- and with much less investment than even one copy of the some of the aircraft the U.S. Air Force flies. We already know how to bounce radio signals all around the globe, and it's already cheap, reliable, and secure. So what's the "value add" here that merits substantial public investment? Anybody have any ideas?
What could possibly go wrong?
Maybe they know something we don't. This setup will allow for an alternate comm path should the current satellites and cables become unavailable. Hams and the government would still be able to communicate. Assuming an EMP event, then most of the hams would be out of business and only the govt would still be able to communicate with the equipment that we paid for them to harden... Just sayin'
Dear Microlimp: I give you 2 valid product keys for win7 and you reject both of them. Piss off you wankers!!!
This is excellent news if true. Short wave broadcast radio has been in decline all my life and radio hams have increasingly turned to the more exciting fields of digital communications and microwave. If it livens up the bands again then I am all for it. I assume that the objective is to learn how to thicken it up enough to locally cut off communications from space thereby killing the enemies communications network. The only downside might be disruption of radio astronomy, but we should be doing that from the moon anyway.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
Given the size of ionosphere, the ionisation density and recombination rate, and the size of a micro satellite this project looks like trying to deplete Lake Tahoe with a teaspoon...
The last time the USA fucked around with the ionosphere was a bit of a disaster. Please do not do this again; just leave it alone. Wired article. They are also an object group on stuffin.space.
I am sure that radio astronomers would agree with you on that one, as well as oppose this 'plan'
After all, while such plasma will help reflect internal signals, it will also help block external ones,
including signals to most other satellites - seems like a winner (although the effects are very
frequency dependent).
I suspect this is someone in charge of old systems wanting to get more funding for their little
fiefdom without looking at the modernisation of communications, where ionosphere bounce is
rapidly becoming an outdated method.
That and the fact that suggesting military NOT spend big money on any idea they come up with
if bordering on treason these days, right?
Mind you, the HAARP conspiracy crowd will LOVE it, make them even more paranoid ;)
Some Generals need a plasma bomb exploded straight up their arseholes. Damn people always f$&%ing with nature only thing that is truly valuable.
Just put order of magnitude in this plan, and you see this is pure bullshit.
Maybe they know something we don't. This setup will allow for an alternate comm path should the current satellites and cables become unavailable. Hams and the government would still be able to communicate. Assuming an EMP event, then most of the hams would be out of business and only the govt would still be able to communicate with the equipment that we paid for them to harden... Just sayin'
If current satellites are disabled then likely these satellites would be too. An EMP would take them out too. Offering protection to other satellites from solar winds sounds interesting but it still seems like we are missing something from the discussion about what the real objective is.
where ionosphere bounce is rapidly becoming an outdated method.
Hate to break it to you, buddy, but it's still the only infrastructure-free method of global communication, which means it's just as effective as when it was first discovered. Your massive satellite/cable network is great for when everyone's playing nice and is OK with a small group of people having control of almost all the information flow, and your ionospheric propagation remains good otherwise.
tl;dr Progress is good, but should not be misidentified nor misinterpreted. 2.
This said, changing propagation characteristics of the ionosphere seems to be a crap idea. Or, rather, it's an obvious idea with consequences that haven't really been thought through.
Maybe they know something we don't.
Yeah, they know that they need justification for spending yet even more tax money. When evaluating the true purpose of a government program, never overlook the possibility that the program is designed to merely justify spending. It's an entirely different situation when you're spending other people's money.
Assuming an EMP event, then most of the hams would be out of business and only the govt would still be able to communicate with the equipment that we paid for them to harden... Just sayin'
You may have it backwards. Hams are known for collecting what are known among hams as "boat anchors"...vintage equipment using vacuum tube technology. Attend any hamfest and you'll see almost literally tons of such equipment for sale/trade. Some of the more recent tube-type shortwave radios ('60s-'70s) are even capable of SSB (Single Side Band) and other modes of operation besides the traditional CW (Morse) and AM voice.
Tube-based communications equipment by it's nature is usually capable of surviving far higher/more-intense EMP pulses than comparable solid-state equipment, all else being equal. Russia/USSR kept producing and using vacuum tube electronics in military gear into the '80s and Russia is today a major supplier of vacuum tubes used in such things as guitar amplifiers and audiophile equipment.
It could possibly turn out that the US government would need communications assistance from hams, rather than the reverse.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Look at the bright side. For the first time, scientists and nutjobs will stand united in their complaint about something.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Come on, easy chesey
And people laugh at chemtrails. Ha! (ha ha)
Itâ(TM)s ... weâ(TM)ve ... CubeSat â" roughly ... thereâ(TM)s
bling bling bling!
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
Because when the enemy takes out your satellites you can't communicate anymore. And if you can't command and control, you've lost.
The summary of this article is mangled by the fact that slashdot still doesn't handle unicode correctly. Didn't the new owners promise that they were going to fix this? Yeah, we know the old guard left a mess behind but there are already examples of other sites starting with slashcode and fixing that bug...
I don't know where you think you are, but this is the American internet. We don't need Unicode, communist.
it makes the atmosphere catch fire and burn all the oxygen.
awesome!
One of my hobbies is critiquing unpublished authors, and there's a certain group of writers who write post-apocalyptic "gun sci-fi" where it's more important to get the minutiae of gun technology right than it is to get the science right. Their science tends to come straight from other stories. The EMP scenario is sufficiently popular that I decided to spend a weekend afternoon doing the research into EMP that they should have.
EMP is not magic, like in the movies or on TV. It works by physical effects that require energy to be propagated to the affected device, which can be shielded and otherwise radiation hardened. You would need a massive attack that saturates all of near space to take out all satellites from geosynchronous orbits down to LEO. Terrestrial effects are amplified by interaction with the Earth's atmosphere and magnetic field, but even so the kind of blanket destruction of electronics we see in TV sci-fi would require many, many warheads. Many small warheads work better than a few (or usually ONE in the stories I read).
So an attack on communication satellites would tend to be targeted at individual satellites or groups of satellites. Taking out all LEO satellites (assuming they can't be shielded) would require an attack similar to blanketing most of the surface of the Earth.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
This sounds like the type of thinking that would had caused the condition of Spaceballs.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Some of the equipment is even capable of ssb, eh? All of the last generation of tube based transceivers from the 70s/80s had the same basic functionality as todays rigs - that certainly includes SSB, AM, CW, digital modes, slow scan TV, and some FM. Even now, most brand new high powered RF amplifiers for hams sold today are still tube based, though solid state amps are getting more popular.
The whole purpose of this is to facilitate non-satellite transmission of signals using ionospheric skywave propagation. This is the most common over-the-horizon communication method for HF frequencies (3-30MHz) and below. The military uses HF for tactical communications using radios like the Harris Falcon series manpacks. HF is also used for the Military Auxiliary Radio Service as well as Civil Air Patrol. None of these uses have dependence on satellites which are, in any event, potentially prone to attack, jamming and failure by natural phenomena, and where end user equipment is expensive and potentially tricky to deploy.
In order for HF communications to work effectively and consistently, the sun needs to ionize the atmosphere. It normally goes in the same eleven year cycles, but this year has seen very bad conditions with insufficient consistency to rely on HF. The shortwave and amateur radio community has similarly been affected adversely by this phenomenon. Ionizing the atmosphere through this proposal is one way to make this happen without relying on satellites.
What's the value added? It's that it will give them the ability to turn our Planet into another Venus! That should be enough reason.
One difference is that satellites have difficulty communicating with ground stations over ELF/VLF as used by submerged nuclear submarines. They're quite dependent upon ionospheric bounce, and in order to use satellite communications they have to raise to at least periscope depth.
It sounds simple enough. There's no chance of any problems whatsoever. It's completely 100% safe. Don't worry about it. Everything will be fine. We know what we're doing.
We don't know who struck first, us or them. But we do know it was us that scorched the sky.
But apparently you *can* bomb it.
Pound! Bang! Bin! Bash! is this a shell script or a Batman comic?
Generally slashdot stories are meant to rile us, the idea of clickbait is to present us with something objectionable so our emotions take over and we post angrily about this that and the other.
I however wish to see the result of this experiment. Likely the plasma is not going to stay forever and it would be good to know the results. Perhaps in fact the yield should be significantly increased in subsequent tests to find the correct altitude, parts per million necessary, etc. There are other possibilities that we have not yet conceived of and this sort of hands on testing is the path forward even if mistakes occur.
On the other hand, current communications appear to be extraordinary and the greatest they have ever been in all of known human history so this test does not entirely make sense. It could still be useful knowledge to tuck under a gentlemans hat for the future though and is there fore worth it.
We at the ICPA are wholly opposed to this as it will lead to massive layoffs across what is already a struggling field in general aviation. We've been charged with maintaining proper atmospheric reflectivity for well over 30 years and have never missed a day of work. Why fix what isn't broken?
This sounds like a cover story for something else entirely. Anybody know if they are still using OTH Radar?
So, satellites are great for peace time.....
I suspect this is the Air Force planning for conflict....
Russia, China and (likely) most of Europe and a few others can shoot them down.
They also take time and money to replace...
I suspect the Air Force is planning to have a rocket of these on standby to 'charge' the ionisphere so they can still communicate and figure out what to do when the satellites have been shot/jammed and cables cut.
On a similar note, but the Navy and Marines are planning for GPS denial attacks (physical or jamming).
Worth it or not....don't know
what could possibly go wrong
Interesting. What does an EMP do to a living creature's nervous system, if anything?
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Wait, I thought the sky wanted to plasma bomb the Air Force, not the other way around.
Why
Hate to break it to you, buddy, but it's still the only infrastructure-free method of global communication, which means it's just as effective as when it was first discovered.
Plasma bomb deployment systems sound like infrastructure to me.
I think I saw this movie: https://youtu.be/kAH9ACUL_iI
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
There is a reason the Ionosphere is what it is. We've grown up on this (shielded) planet, why make it bad?
Radio reception is not worth meddling with our ionosphere. They sound like they're gods or something?
Messing with the Atmosphere is a very bad thing and just the thought that they proposed this makes the
chemtrail conspiracy argument look more reasonable (playing with weather/atmosphere).
Maybe this will be enough to finally kick in a runaway greenhouse effect, a la Venus? All this sounds like an alien conspiracy to 'Terraform' Earth.
Yeah the point is that one can still use the ionosphere to bounce signals around the world without that system. Radio amateurs and then professionals have been playing with it for a good hundred years.
These plasma bombs just improve/block the signal, depending on your view.
Living here in Vault 81, I'm pretty sure there's no danger from plasma bombs in the atmosphere.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Severe brain damage, to an extent which qualifies them to be a Slashdot editor.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
Because when the enemy takes out your satellites you can't communicate anymore. And if you can't command and control, you've lost.
Quite right.. Which is why the Iraqi Army lost two back to back conflicts with the USA. The Command And Control networks where degraded to the point of ineffectiveness within an hour of the bombing starting. They where reduced to passing notes and carrier pidgins which left the front line troops with no backup and no way to coordinate the hasty retreat they so desperately needed.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
What are you talking about? Removing an enemy's communications, command and control is the very first thing you do once you've established air superiority. And as for affecting the environment, the Sun does the same thing to the ionosphere every time it pops off an X-ray burst. The military just wants to be able to do it on their schedule and with more intensity.
It's only A Matter of Time, 109 days to be exact (nine months and five days) before they burn up the atmosphere of Penthara IV.
Terrestrial radio uses frequency division AND geographic separation in order to provide communications ability to the users on this planet. To tinker with the ionosphere would increase propagation even for those signals for which propagation beyond line of sight was not a significant concern. Not every user needs over-the-horizon signaling. To a very large degree, we use the horizon effect for useful things- for one, it allows us to have multiple 100KW television transmitters all using the same channel all on the same continent. Ionospheric changes will have negligible effect on the power needed to adequately cover a metropolitan area with signal, and may actually INCREASE the power needed to swamp a distant signal that's intruding spatially into another market.
i would prefer the government to leave the atmosphere alone, the government tends to cause more harm than good when they go to meddling with things,. i always say the government has a "reverse midas touch" thats where everything they touch turns to shit (instead of gold)
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Here's the thing about ad-blockers! Every time I'm interrupted for using one, I instantly close the page and never revisit that source again!
Geez, I just bought new TVs...looked at and even bought and returned newer LCD ones, event he SUHD ones....just too much motion blur, artifacts..etc.
I finally got an OLED..which is close to my old Plasma...but just isn't quite as cinematic....
Oh well..back to the story...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Rekt
An impact study for something like that would take hundreds of years, perhaps thousands of years, to determine what effect it would have.
There are still people so naive that they believe that we could do no harm so great that it would make the human race's survival difficult and worthless.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Morpheus: We don't know who struck first, us or them. But we do know it was us that scorched the sky.
10 centimeters cubed = (10 cm)^3 = 1 litre ~= 1 Quart ~= 60 cu. in. ~= 1/28 cu. ft. ~= the bottom half of four 16 fl. oz water bottles arranged in a square.
Just trying to make sure people picture things correctly.
He effected a bored affect.
Maybe they know something we don't. This setup will allow for an alternate comm path should the current satellites and cables become unavailable. Hams and the government would still be able to communicate. Assuming an EMP event, then most of the hams would be out of business and only the govt would still be able to communicate with the equipment that we paid for them to harden... Just sayin'
If current satellites are disabled then likely these satellites would be too. An EMP would take them out too. Offering protection to other satellites from solar winds sounds interesting but it still seems like we are missing something from the discussion about what the real objective is.
Current satellites are already targeted by the other major powers. One of the primary purposes of these cube sats is that there are so many, and so small as to make the idea of taking them out nearly impossible.
Just another day in Paradise
So let me get this straight: We all have to worry about Hairspray, Cow Farts, and every other perceived man-made cause of "Climate Change" (f/k/a "Global Warming"); but now we want to intentionally "pollute" the ionosphere?
What could possibly go wrong?
Use an ad-blocker-blocker-blocker too. No ads on the page and no interruption for using an ad-blocker.
The military just wants to be able to do it on their schedule and with more intensity.
Yeah, so it'll be JUST like what the Sun does.
Oh, wait...
Real "fate worse than death" shit then, huh?
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
It is too bad that the military is not asking for permission to do this. They will do this cause someone somewhere said it needs to be done and the decision has been made.
Russia is today a major supplier of vacuum tubes used in such things as guitar amplifiers and Faux audiophile equipment.
FTFY.
Turn off everything that processes video, and you will have your cinematic 24fps back.
The blur is intentional, and is able to be disabled.
Or, rather, it's an obvious idea with consequences that haven't really been thought through.
Which is true of so many things, although it's usually politicians having those ideas.
I don't think it's a good idea to let Blunt Instruments (military people) make the decisions on science.
Let the accountants do the accounting, the doctors do the doctoring, and the engineers do the engineering. We don't tell the military to blow shit up and destroy the enemy, so let's not let them tell us how to do these other things either.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Yep, I tried that (good advice)...but still didn't make the LCD image look as good as the Plasma.
The OLED is close...but I still gotta find some guide out there on how to 'tune' the colors and all better.
The LCDs also didn't have the quality blacks that Plasma did...the OLED is very very close.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
On nights when the skip is good, the border blasters are already wiping out local radio and TV stations with their Mexican crap.
That..
Look at the bright side. For the first time, scientists and nutjobs will stand united in their complaint about something.
AGW? If you think they don't have any nutjobs, well... you might be the nutjob.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
>I'm struggling to understand why improving radio communications using "plasma bomb" satellites is such a great idea
Considering that cubes can't treat a large area or treat continuously, it's evident that this would be useful for a few short duration missions in specific problematic locations. It might permit VHF or UHF linking with relatively small antennas, less directional/critical and better suited for on-the-run use than satellite dishes. More powerful satellites are costly, and even when that's justified they could still be taken out by lasers.
Even if a cube somehow had more capacity, this isn't something to do for a large area or continuously as changing atmospheric charge or aerosols would affect the weather and some materials might affect biology as well (red rain, angel hair growth etc.). Signal effects would probably last a bit longer than plasma produced by bursts from a high-power laser. It won't fix GPS, but might be useful to disturb it at a particular location.
As long as the plasma stays up there, though, it'll last a lot longer than a satellite.
I was thinking Highlander II ....
Yes Wired sucks balls. That's why I posted the Wikipedia and stuffin.space links as well.
Should we boycott paywall and anti ad-blocking sites (Wired, Forbes, etc...) completely?
DX has been in the tank lately.
All of those things you suggest are either reusable or durable. The military wants something that is neither. They want something they have blow up because that way they get something they can keep buying over and over again, so their procurement guys keep getting their kick backs. Congress persons want something they can blow up because its continuous stream of pork to their district.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
This reminds me of that mine in the Matrix, "It was us who scorched the sky"
I kid you not: I recently saw an ad-blocker-blocker-blocker tool ad, and as I was using an ad-blocker-blocker-blocking tool at that time I was getting kinda confused as to whether they were on to something with that or not.
A sinister possibility remains: it's an obvious idea with consequences that have, incidentally, been thought through.
Remo Williams plot was more on the mark- it was even about HAARP! And Satelites! And fake vaporware to get tax dollars (the bad guys even blew up the evidence, so that they could claim Remo did it and never have to prove that it didn't work!)
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Nothing.
Electronic components lying around in their plastic tubes likely won't be affected either. It's currents induced in wires and circuit traces that create problems for vulnerable components. Streetlights for example are very robust, but are attached to very large networks of wires that act like antennas.
Nervous systems use chemical signalling; since this involves the movement of charged atoms across neuron membranes that can be disrupted by relatively high electron currents, but it is not very responsive (if at all) to static and magnetic fields.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
how could this possibly go wrong
One of the proposals in the study involves launching bombs from satellites. The bombs current only detonate to create plasma, and the research is into how to get the bomb to detonate where you want. It's clear that if you can do that, you can pack other types of bombs onto satellites. This idea is fairly useless in terms of current communications needs but makes a great cover for covert space-weapons research which is otherwise against all treaties.
So what's the "value add" here that merits substantial public investment?
They get to spend lots of money, build new BOMBS! and blow them up. The military's answer to everything is blow it up. You know "Kill them all and let God sort them out.." It's all about new toys and blowing shit up.
come to mind when I hear that they want plasma bomb the atmosphere
This won't cause global cooling, will it? ;-)
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
Hate to break it to you, buddy, but it's still the only infrastructure-free method of global communication
So making it infrastructure dependent will be a bad idea, right? Once you start deploying plasma bombs, all device makers will start depending on it. Lower costs, more efficient, etc. If you want to keep the "infrastructure free method of global communication", you need to keep it active and alive.
Some of the equipment is even capable of ssb, eh? All of the last generation of tube based transceivers from the 70s/80s had the same basic functionality as todays rigs - that certainly includes SSB, AM, CW, digital modes, slow scan TV, and some FM. Even now, most brand new high powered RF amplifiers for hams sold today are still tube based, though solid state amps are getting more popular.
Sorry, was talking to younger people that likely have no clue and think if something uses tubes it's a step above the abacus at best. I've owned walls full of all sorts of old radio gear and used to have a repair shop back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Usually had a table at the hamfests upon which such things as E.F. Johnson transmitters/amplifiers, Yaesu FT-series transceivers, Collins Radio gear, Hallicrafters gear, all the old classics, might be found on any particular occasion, but I almost invariably ended up going home with as much or more gear than I brought, heh!
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
I have never accused the military of making intelligent decisions, and this idea does nothing but solidify that perception.